Prologue

Helena was worried. She was worried about the region of space their ship was approaching. She was more worried about the ongoing destruction of the universe. But the thing that worried her most was Markusz. His relationship with the rest of the team had hit rock bottom. Or maybe somewhere beneath rock bottom.
            Case in point: the latest in a long line of arguments with Teel, the project leader. Although Helena was – in no small part – to blame for this one.
            “What do you mean we’re doing another drone test?” Markusz said in that tone he’d perfected that not only implied the subject of his enquiry was an idiot but that it was a fact carved in stone. “There’s no more useful data to be gained from a drone. We need onsite calibration of the annulus, fine-tuned to direct readings inside the Effect area. We’re due on Redout in a month with a cast-iron solution and this won’t get us it.”
            Teel glanced Helena’s way and she concentrated on her augment window. He’d promised and she was determined to hold him to that promise. Thankfully, Teel was as good as his word.
            “I hear you,” he told Markusz. “But I’ve decided. I want one more drone test before we commit a team. There’s another Effect due in a week within range. We can calibrate onsite then.”
            “It’s probably a better option,” Rachik – second in Markusz’s team – offered, and Helena appreciated him going in to bat for her. “It’ll be sm–”
            “If I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it,” Markusz snapped.
            Helena cringed. Time to cut this short.
            “Okay,” she said, placing a hand on Markusz’s shoulder. She could feel the tension there; he wasn’t such an arsehole under normal circumstances. “If it’s a drone shot, you don’t need us. Come on, Markusz. You’ve been working around the clock. Get some rest and the data will be waiting for us in the morning.”
            “Much use it’ll be,” Markusz grumbled. But he let her turn him towards the door.
            Teel nodded at Helena as they left. She felt like a traitor.
            Out in the corridor, the ship was in night cycle. Gold cherubs looked down at them from the shadows – somewhat reprovingly, Helena fancied – as they walked to their stateroom.
            “Markusz …” she said.
            “I know. I know.” He at least sounded regretful for his outburst. “It’s just –”
            “I know,” she said, taking his arm in hers and pulling him close. “You take on too much. You haven’t been to bed the last two nights. Forget about all this for one evening and get some rest.”
            She palmed the door open and led him to the bed. He sank down to sit on the mattress edge. Poor thing was dead on his feet.
            He kicked off his shoes, and she helped him with his cravat and blouse, and he lay on top of the bedcovers and sighed deeply. She pulled a blanket over him and leant down to kiss him on the lips. A normal kiss, like any of the dozens they shared in a day. She didn’t dare anything more.
            His eyes opened sleepily. “You’re not coming to bed?”
            “I’ve just got a couple of things to switch off in the workshop,” she said. “I won’t be long.”
            She waited in the doorway until his breathing settled into a steady rhythm. Then she left and took the elevator to the shuttle bay.
            Teel and Rachik were waiting for her. Teel’s glare was particularly reproachful.
            “I’m really, really sorry,” she said. “Thank you for keeping your promise, Teel. And thank you, Rachik. I’m sorry he spoke to you that way.”
            “You have nothing to apologise for,” Rachik said.
            “But he is insufferable,” Teel said.
            She nodded. “He is. He’s the insufferable genius that created the annulus. Something that none of us could have achieved without him.”
            Teel raised an eyebrow. “You’re so sure of that?”
            “I’ve worked closest with him and I am. Just as I’m sure we can’t risk him on a calibration mission. If we lost him now, none of us could finish the work.”
            “And he wouldn’t let you go without him,” Teel said. “I understand, but –”
            “But in the meantime, he is insufferable, yes. But when this is over and he allows himself a breath, he’ll realise how badly he’s treated you. Both of you.” She smiled. “We’ll save the universe together. Then we’ll look back on all of this and we’ll laugh. But first …” She looked towards the shuttle.
            “The calibration mission,” Teel said. “The ship is prepped.”
            “Five hours there, two hours onsite at maximum, five hours back. And still thirty hours before the Effect hits,” Helena said.
            “He won’t be happy when he finds out you went without him,” Teel said.
            “I know. But by then I’ll be on my way back to Endeavour. Get him to call me when he wakes. I’ll take the brunt of it.”
            “Be safe,” Rachik said.
            She kissed him on the cheek and he drew back a little, shocked. But what the hell. They’d been colleagues for eleven years.
            “See you in twelve hours,” she said.
            Keats turned in the pilot’s seat as she entered the shuttle. Originally from Alba, he was the same age as Helena but a dusting of freckles across his nose and cheeks made him look like a pubescent youth.
            His lips twisted in a wicked smirk. “Have you charmed the dragon to sleep with your feminine wiles?”
            “Don’t make me laugh about it. I feel bad enough.” She strapped into the seat beside him.
            “I don’t know if all this subterfuge is worth how pissed off he’ll be when he wakes up,” Keats said. “We’re going to be perfectly safe.”
            “He’s too important to the project to lose.”
            “Aye.” Keats’s smile was kinder now. “And he’s too important to you.”
            Keats piloted them through the atmosphere envelope and set them on course for Hesione, the outermost moon of the Deucalion System settled by the Thousand Worlds only a century before.
            “Best speed,” he said. “Just time for a decent nap.”
            “If only.”
            Helena opened an augment window and read the sensor feeds from Endeavour, rearranging and tweaking the outputs to her liking.
            Deucalion was the eleventh collapse she’d observed directly and so far it looked textbook, though on the smaller end of the scale. The area of space involved was twenty-three light years wide and fluctuations in quantum particle creation and destruction were elevated everywhere. The uptick had commenced simultaneously right across the region in a non-local way. Everything about the Effect was non-local. Markusz believed that was due to a remnant of entanglement across the Effect area from the earliest inflation period of the universe. Not that it really helped them work out how to stop it. But he was a completionist. He liked to have an answer for every aspect of a thing.
            She sifted more data, looking for something atypical in the readings, but everything was steady and by the numbers – if those terms could be applied to something that annihilated space in a way that broke every physical law established by science over two and a half millennia of gradual progress towards understanding the cosmos.
            Two hours in and nothing on comms. Markusz was sleeping soundly.
            Even though Helena couldn’t sleep, she did feel at rest. Thoughts came and went and she let them, not really engaging.
            Deucalion System was laid out before her. Four planets. The outer two gas giants, both haloed with orbital mining rings supporting massive extraction needles that thrust down into the cloudy atmospheres even as far as the molten centres to sup up precious elements. The inner two worlds were completely settled; though the millions of inhabitants had been evacuated on two highliners a month before and were well on their way to Redout. Even so, the twinkling lights of continent-spanning cities showed on the night sides. Cities of ghosts now. Nothing there but the memories of the people that had called them home.
            “Coming in on the moon,” Keats said.
            She shook herself. Maybe she had fallen asleep.
            She opened a window to Endeavour. Rachik appeared, looking as tired as she felt.
            “We’re about to land,” she said.
            “Everything checks out here,” he said. “I’ll let you know the moment that changes.”
            It was clear from Rachik’s demeanour that Markusz still hadn’t surfaced. Good. He deserved the rest. And maybe he’d be a bit more forgiving of the others when he did wake.
            The moon was a declared wildlife sanctuary for the indigenous flora and fauna. Even though its atmosphere and mild climate made it entirely liveable, it had been deemed too small for a colony world. Keats brought them down to a cleared and fenced area that had been used by a rotating team of botanists and zoologists. The windows and doors of the main structure and ancillary buildings were all shuttered, the facility mothballed for a return that would never occur.
            As the lock opened, Helena smelled rich, loamy soil and a jumble of animalish scents.
            The ramp to the hold at the rear of the shuttle extended and Keats trundled a case – half as tall again as he was – onto the landing apron and clear of the ship.
            An alien whooping echoed from the pine tree analogues past the fence line. They were safe enough behind the fence, but Helena activated the annulus cradle’s protective field out of an abundance of caution and the world beyond the force wall took on a bluish, hazy cast.
            Keats undogged the latches and the casing fell away. The annulus floated free above the cradle, a colourful spectrum extruded like toffee and twisted around itself into a mobius strip. This was the visible projection of the mathematical transforms Markusz had wrought. There was far more to the annulus, reaching deep into the magnetic, strong and weak nuclear forces, gravitational wave forms and down to the quantum level. A unifying synthesis that achieved the impossible. Or would do when it was perfected.
            Helena and Keats stood opposite each other with the annulus between them. She raised an augment window, linked it to Keats’s and opened a channel to Endeavour.
            “We’re starting now,” she said on comms.
            She nodded to Keats and he keyed the initiation sequence while she monitored the substrate. The annulus rotated slowly counterclockwise then backtracked before reversing again, zeroing in on the key resonance driving the quantum particle uptick. It stopped turning as it locked on and Keats brought the annulus up to full operation.
            That’s when the readings in Helena’s window uniformly trended into the red.
            “Keats,” she said.
            “I see it. Shutting down.”
            “What’s happening?” Teel asked.
            The readings were getting worse. She flipped to Keats’s window. The annulus wasn’t shutting down. She looked up but the sky above was a cloudy daytime, hazed by the shield.
            A window opened from Endeavour. A view from beyond the edge of the Effect.
            Space was melting.
            “Get out of there,” Teel said.
            Then she heard Markusz. “What’s happening?”
            He sounded as bewildered as she felt.
            Then he shouted. “Teel! What the fuck have you done?”

1

Sylfe Cachand stood at the penthouse’s windowwall and stared out at Redout. This apartment – much like her own in the adjacent tower – sat atop one of the older buildings in the Palisades, a suburb named for the barrier the early settlers built against the high UV and borderline poisonous atmosphere of this world when it had been known as Garia. But, she reflected, there wasn’t much of that world left now.
            The view was completely urbanised. Buildings crowded against each other like rival trees jostling for space and sunlight, covering the river valley her building overlooked and burying the far-off coastline beneath pontoons. There were underwater dwellings too. Since the establishment of the Redout Project, there wasn’t much of the planet’s 1.6 billion square kilometre surface that wasn’t being actively developed – not to mention the network of tunnels and underground cities the Corps d’Ingénieurs had built under the direction of Ernes Fontaneau’s Destruction sur Commande SA, the biggest terraforming company in the Paradisan Combine.
            The atmosphere had, of course, been reprocessed long ago, but as for the high UV – well, that was something SolEng SA, Sylfe’s own family’s business, was working on, along with a few other tweaks to the local sun.
            Redout was the biggest humanitarian effort in history. And for the last three years Sylfe had served as a member of the project’s governing council while directing solar operations. Fontaneau was council head, and both he and Hugo Denantes – the only other Paradisan council member – kept apartments in the Council Tower. She’d been offered one when she’d first arrived and promptly refused. She could think of nothing worse than bumping into either of them in the corridors.
            Sylfe took a final look around the salon to check everything was in order and gestured a comm window open. The edges buzzed with static and echoes of exotic energy. That wasn’t normal, and she couldn’t help thinking it was some portent of the Effect closing in on them. It deepened the anxiety she’d been feeling ever since the evacuation of Paradis had been scheduled. She just wanted it over with. She wanted her family here. Safe.
            The interface cleared and Adele Cachand – her mother and Matri of the Great Family of Cachand – and Sylfe’s sister, Yvette, appeared, both sitting in the summerhouse judging by the view of the family vineyards behind. The setting sun picked out the red highlights in Yvette’s hair. She looked like a slightly younger twin of Sylfe. Just as Sylfe looked like a much younger twin of their mother. Both sisters had been born by parthenogenesis. It was their mother’s thing. She’d never found a partner she considered her equal.
            “Sylfe!” Yvette’s smile was as sunny as usual, and Sylfe stifled the surge of relief that threatened to overwhelm her. She didn’t want them to know how much she missed them.
            “Sister. Maman,” she said. “Is this how you spend your days when I’m away?”
            Yvette raised a glass of wine to her. “We eat, drink and are merry while you slave at thankless tasks for the common good.”
            “And is Suzanne carousing with you?”
            Yvette’s smile dimmed. “No, she’s more like you. She’s still at the hospital getting patients ready for evacuation. I’ve barely seen her all week.”
            Sylfe’s augment threw the data up in her field of view. The GH highliner was en route and on schedule to arrive at Paradis in eight days. That gave them a full month for evacuation to Redout, and another month’s safety margin before the Effect was predicted to hit Paradis.
            “Where exactly are you?” Adele asked, peering into their shared comm window.
            Sylfe smiled. “You recognise …?”
            “I recognise my own salon in the main house, but … You’re not here. Are you?”
            “I wish I were. I’ve had the furnishings fabricated to exactly match your rooms. The bed chamber and en suite too. Everything as you are familiar with it. Smaller of course, but I want you to feel settled when you get here.”
            “That’s very thoughtful, my dear,” Adele said.
            “And what about me?” Yvette asked.
            “You, dear sister, have an apartment beneath mine in the next building. But it’s a blank canvas. I thought you and Suzanne would want to furnish your first home together.”
            “You’re looking after yourself?” Adele asked. “Eating regularly?”
            Sylfe gave the rote “Yes, Maman” monotone response she and Yvette had developed for such maternal inquiries, which Adele ignored.
            “And keeping out of trouble? I don’t like to think of you at the mercy of Fontaneau.”
            “I’m hardly at his mercy,” Sylfe said. “If anything, he’s at mine.”
            She’d been spying on the Patri of the Great Fontaneau Family from the moment she’d arrived on Redout. Unlike the other Great Families, who had sent their ablest – or in Denantes’s case most embarrassing – children to aid the Redout effort, the Patri had chosen to come in person. That alone was enough to make Adele Cachand – and Sylfe – suspicious, even without Fontaneau’s long record of shrewd and devious business dealings.
            “Though,” Sylfe continued, “it’s worse having to be in the same room as Denantes.”
            Yvette shuddered and refilled her glass. “That mental image demands another drink.”
            “They’re both terrible people,” Adele said. “But at least Denantes wears his ugliness on the outside.”
            “It will be a relief when M-Gov arrives to take over,” Sylfe said. “In the meantime, the Endeavour group are nearly here.”
            “That’s good,” Yvette said.
            “Maybe, but Fontaneau has been in regular communication with the project head, Teel. More so than you’d expect from even the council chair. He’s really turning on the charm.”
            “He’s up to something,” Adele said.
            Sylfe agreed. “I’ve stepped up my surveillance.”
            “Good. I’ll see what other intel we can discover from this end,” Adele said. “Fontaneau doesn’t suspect you’re spying on him, does he?”
            Sylfe shook her head. “Not in the slightest.”
            “Well, be careful. It sounds like you’re in more danger than we are.”
            “I’m not going to do anything stupid.”
            A voice called out and Yvette put down her glass and half-rose. “That’s Suzanne. Do you want to say hello?”
            “No,” Sylfe said. “I’ll talk to you later. Enjoy your evening. Love you both.”
            “Love you,” Adele and Yvette said together and the connection ended.
            Sylfe went to the bureau and poured herself a glass of wine, silently toasting her mother and sister. They were safe and they’d be here soon. And together they would face whatever came next.

2

“You’re thinking too much.”
            “Hmmm?” Markusz focused past the image of his face in the mirror – he’d acquired far too many wrinkles around the eyes and mouth for his liking.
            Helena was in bed, her black hair and pale skin a strong contrast to the faded gold of the brocade headboard. Faded and pretty threadbare too actually. This was one of the lesser accommodations on the Cooperative Sciences and Technology Organisation Task Force ship Endeavour. They’d had a far more sumptuous room on the upper decks, all giltwood and marble, with big picture windows out to the infinite. But that was before … Before.
            “Thinking too much,” Helena repeated.
            “There’s nothing to think about.” He concentrated on tying his cravat again. “This is the culmination of everything we’ve worked for. Now – finally – we start.” He gestured and an augment window opened beside the mirror showing Redout’s sun clearly visible now, the brightest star in this remarkably unremarkable part of space. “Our new home. Or … it would have been.”
            “Don’t.” She was behind him now, her face clear over his shoulder. A broad, open face, green eyes alive and liquid, her dark brows drawn together.
            “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll be fine.”
            She smiled. “You really won’t. And you have to watch Teel. Don’t piss him off.”
            “Huh. He should worry about pissing me off.”
            “You said it yourself – this is where it all starts. Teel joined the Task Force right at the beginning twenty years ago, and he’s led it for the past sixteen. He may not be as brilliant a scientist as you – ”
            Markusz snorted gently. “There’s no ‘may’ about it.”
            “But he has political nous. He’s a survivor. He has to be to still be project lead after everything that’s happened.”
            Markusz felt the hot flush of anger again. “A lot of which he caused.”
            “I’m as much to blame for that as he is,” Helena said.
            She was right. But he didn’t like to think about that.
            He finished his cravat as best he could and pulled on his justacorps, adjusting the collar and turning up the cuffs. He wanted to make the best impression possible. Show Teel everything was fine.
            “How do I look?”
            “Like the man I married?”
            He grimaced.
            “Too painful?”
            “You know it is.”
            The engine tone – heard and ignored for so long on this voyage – shouldered into his consciousness as it shifted pitch. The ship was decelerating, but they couldn’t be there already.
            He still had passive access to the bridge feed. The augment window shifted to show a much closer view of Redout space with multiple views. Central was an “over-the-shoulder” image from the Master’s seat, looking past the navigation stations to the main display, which was flanked by external views forward and aft.
            The Endeavour was slowing up behind a ship that would dwarf something fifty times its size – one of the Galactische Handelsonderneming highliners pressed into refugee service. To either side and behind them, the volume around Redout space was overwhelmed with vessels of all designs and sizes, stretching as far as Markusz could see.
            Helena, Markusz and the others had been on the Endeavour for years, chasing the Effect and running their experiments, all under the constant pressure of news reports from those parts of the Thousand Worlds that were being evacuated ahead of a predicted collapse. But this was the first time Markusz had seen the human impact of that unfolding in real time before his eyes. Redout was the final destination for so many whose homes no longer existed.
            The rough armada of vessels was ranged along some invisible barrier, perhaps simply a stipulated distance from Redout’s sun. As the highliner moved past this dividing line and into the clear space beyond, Markusz saw what was holding the other ships back: M-Def battleships. Massive elongated spearheads, studded with weapons pods and emplacements along their central spines, with singleship ports and booster strips open along the sides. Markusz had no idea how many were deployed, but enough to hold back the sea of refugee ships and maintain some kind of order. For the time being at least.
            The Master ordered Endeavour forward but, as they picked up speed, the ship began to heel over. Bottles tumbled from Markusz’s dressing table as artificial gravity strained to catch up. A klaxon shrieked in the corridor and the bridge view blanked, replaced by a “transmission paused” card, but the external views were still live.
            Markusz saw something streaking towards Endeavour from behind, like a silver fish through water. Beneath the klaxon’s steadily rising whine, the ship groaned as its engines struggled to push it onto a new course away from the incoming missile. There was no way they could move fast enough. It was going to hit.
            Then two “somethings” streaked in from the left of the window and the missile blossomed into fire. Markusz shut his eyes against the glare. When he opened them again a singleship shot past from the direction of the M-Def picket line, through the expanding flames, swerved with course-correction, then fired a single burst from its nose cannon.
            Its target – a nondescript mining ship – was clear because the ships around it must have started distancing themselves as soon as the missile was fired. There was a brief flash near the ship’s engines and then it began to drift. There was nothing to indicate why it might have fired on them, though Markusz suspected frustration or desperation may have played a part.
            Then the bridge view was back and the Master was speaking to the ship.
            “Apologies for the sudden manoeuvres. I trust nothing has been damaged,” he said. “M-Def assure me there will be no further trouble and we will dock at Redout in a little over a day.”

The long gallery on the very top deck of Endeavour was all fluted columns topped with chubby infant statuettes. It was much better lit than below. Cleaner too. The ship had been a pleasure cruiser before the Task Force acquired it, which somehow made it far easier to plot Markusz’s descent: from first class to somewhere just above steerage.
            Teel had explained it as a temporary move. Time for Markusz to take a step back. Process what had happened. So he’d processed. As far as he could, anyway. But, beyond that, Markusz couldn’t help feeling that Teel was behind every little slight and indignity he’d endured since the mathematical paper he wrote ten years ago brought him to the Task Force’s attention. Helena was right. Teel never stopped playing politics.
            The intricately moulded gilt doors to the drawing room opened at Markusz’s approach. Teel stood in front of the large picture windows that looked back along their direction of travel. Much of the visible sky was missing, replaced with the spectral red blossoms of Teel-Attar radiation. The universe was dying. They’d watched that death play out across space for over twenty years – though it may have been going on for much longer than that. Now it was time to do something about it.
            Teel had his back to Markusz. He was a tall, thin old man with a pronounced dowager’s hump obvious from this angle. He dressed in the same style as Markusz – they’d both been raised on Respaxon, though Markusz had been brought there as a child, and their upbringings had been very different. The cut of Teel’s justacorps was far more severe, accentuating his thinness like a stick insect.
            He didn’t turn when Markusz entered. Instead he said, “We’ve achieved much together, Zielinski.”
            The obvious retort was, I’ve achieved much while you took the credit, but Markusz bit down on that. This was the moment he took back control. Teel could administrate to his heart’s content, but the real work lay in Markusz’s hands.
            Then he noticed there was someone else in the room with them. Rachik, lounging on a chaise along the back wall. He smirked at Markusz.
            Teel turned, finally, and indicated a chair at the long table. “Please.”
            Markusz didn’t feel like sitting. So they both remained standing while Teel observed him.
            “How are you feeling today?”
            The faux concern was calculated to rankle him, Markusz knew that. Again he avoided the obvious reply. “Ready. The annulus is primed. Once we’ve made our presentation to the Redout Confederation Council, I’ll oversee installation and make the final adjustments to bring it up to full operation. There’ll be a settling-in phase, but with the data we got last time,” he chose his words carefully, edging around the pain, “and the additions I made to the theorem as a result, the dimensional harmonics are better than they’ve ever been.”
            “I agree,” Teel said. “Rachik does too.”
            Why the hell should he care what Rachik thought?
            “Your work has been brilliant,” Teel went on. “After the last test, the changes you made were nothing short of inspired. You have given us – all of us – a real chance. But that work is done now.”
            Markusz snorted. “Done? Who the fuck’s going to run the thing?”
            “Rachik and his team are more than able.”
            If Teel had slapped him, Markusz would’ve felt no different. “No, no, no, no, no,” he said and slipped the leash on the anger he’d been holding back. “You don’t get to make that decision.”
            “The fact is, I have,” Teel said. “You’re erratic. Which means you’re unfit to control our only means of survival.”
            They couldn’t take the annulus away from him. It was all he had left. Markusz looked to Rachik but saw no help there.
            The door opened and two M-Def officers entered. Security to lead him away.
            “Apologies, Ind Zielinski,” the officer who took his arm said.
            Markusz felt numb.
            “You know,” Teel said, “I’d intended to send you on that test. It was Helena who convinced me otherwise.”
            “That’s a lie,” Markusz said. But even to his own ears, he didn’t sound convinced.

The M-Def officers deposited Markusz back in his room, bowed and left.
            “That could have gone better,” Helena said.
            Markusz sank onto the bed. The sound he made was somewhere between a laugh and a sob.
            “What Teel said. Is it true?”
            “How could I tell you? I’m just your memory of me.”
            Helena sat beside him, her hand resting on the tapestry bedcover a finger-width from his own. For the thousandth time he wished he could lift her fingers to his lips.
            He looked into her eyes and thought about their last kiss. Was there something in it that should have alerted him? Had it been longer? More passionate? Charged with an emotion he didn’t understand? If it was, he’d missed it completely.
            Instead, he’d woken to an empty bed and the news that something had gone badly wrong. As soon as the annulus was activated, it had triggered the collapse. Accelerated it even. Helena was dead and … His memories didn’t make sense after that. Not for some time. But he knew there’d been a blazing row with Teel and he’d had to be restrained. Sedated.
            After that, a period of intense work. He’d forced himself to read the data from the test. Every detail of Helena’s death. And he saw it. He knew what had gone wrong. And he knew how to make the annulus work this time. Helena’s sacrifice would not be for nothing.
            He’d perfected the device. It was their crowning glory. But she was still dead. And he had to learn to live with that, even though he didn’t understand it. If what Teel said was true, why had she done that?
            The chime of an incoming message sounded. He gestured and an augment window opened. Message from Endeavour’s Master, but it was Teel’s handiwork.
            “This is to confirm you are to be confined to quarters until journey’s end,” Helena read over his shoulder. “Your lab privileges are revoked and all other accesses are set to minimum.”
            “When we reach Redout, I’m off the ship and off the project.” What the fuck would life be like with his patronage revoked?
            “They can’t do that,” Helena said. “They need you.”
            “Teel doesn’t see that. But others might.”

3

Markusz imagined some kind of scuffle. Security would have to drag him kicking and screaming from the ship and everyone would know how he’d been wronged. But in the end it was all very quiet. The two M-Def soldiers unlocked his room, one picked up his bag, the other nodded amiably to him, and they walked together out to the promenade and down the gangway to the dock. The first soldier deposited Markusz’s bag at his feet, then both saluted and walked back onto the ship.
            Markusz stood for a while, looking up at the vessel that had been his home for the last ten years. The only home he and Helena had shared together. Far back towards the stern, gantries and cranes slid into position along the dock and began to cut and pry at the superstructure. Massive pincers peeled back the skin of the ship and lasers cut into the subframe. This would be the last voyage of the Endeavour. There was nowhere else to go.
            Markusz sat on his bag and felt the full weight of a world of injustice settle on his shoulders. Or to be more precise, 119 per cent of that weight since Redout was almost four times the mass of ancient Earth, if only just over half as dense. To add insult to injury, his augment – which had failed to keep up with the reality of his dismissal – reminded him he had thirty minutes before he was due to present the annulus to the Redout Council. Imagining Teel smugly taking the credit for his and Helena’s work was enough to make his blood boil.
            The Endeavour’s gangway became crowded as more and more crew and support staff debarked for the final time. Markusz recognised some of the technicians and cleaners, but he didn’t know their names, their histories, their hopes. The project had been like a pressure cooker. Everyone focused on their jobs with one, shared goal in mind: find the cause of the Effect and stop it. Nothing else had mattered. There wasn’t time for small talk, making friends. At least that’s how Markusz had felt. Though somehow he’d found the time to fall in love with Helena.
            The steady stream of people reached the prow end of the dock and queued at three large cargo elevators. A sign above them read To the Refugee Centre. Markusz knew what was expected of him: follow everyone else deemed surplus to requirements and disappear. Live what life was left to him quietly. Survive as best he could on whatever Refugee Management provided. They’d been taking in refugees here for over a decade. And still more waited at the heliopause or were on the way. How many more could Redout take? And how would they feed them when supplies from other parts of the Thousand Worlds dried up?
            Seeking distraction, he stood, turned away from the ship and leaned on the handrail at the edge of the dock. At this elevation, he looked across the tops of towers and skyscrapers. Smaller and clearly older buildings were in the minority, dwarfed by newer and far taller constructions, many bearing the lustre of hull-metal cannibalised from earlier ship arrivals. Looking down, he couldn’t see the bottom of the buildings. If there were streets at surface level they were lost in the gloom.
            “Grim place,” Helena said, leaning on the rail beside him. “You don’t belong down there.”
            Markusz wondered why he still imagined she was here. Perhaps he didn’t have a choice.
            “Of course you have a choice,” Helena said. “I’m here because you want me here. Even if you don’t understand the reason.”
            “It’s because I love you. I miss you.”
            She looked at him. “Is it? Maybe you’re just lonely. You were lonely when I met you.”
            “I was always alone.”
            “You were always lonely. It’s a different thing.”
            “I know.” But now he was truly alone. Cast out on an unfamiliar planet with no money, no job, no idea of what to do next. Teel had engineered this. Markusz felt his anger flare again, but in truth he had played a role in his own fall.
            “You’re not easy to get along with at the best of times,” Helena agreed.
            On Endeavour Teel had the final say, but here on Redout others held the ultimate authority. Markusz wasn’t meant to be a refugee. He was meant to be a saviour.
            Far off to the left a blocky peoplemover flew parallel to the dock. His augment flagged it as for essential personnel only. He linked to the Confederation database. His privileges had been cancelled on the ship, but here he was still listed as a senior in the CSTO – for the time being at least. He sent a flag and the vehicle’s repulsors flared as it turned towards him. He stepped aboard and registered his destination, then sat quickly on the plastic bench, placing his bag on the floor, as the mover took to the air again.
            There were others on board. Two severely dressed men sat together on the opposite side near the front. Each wore his hair short at the sides but long on top, oiled and combed back with a precision part above the middle of the left eyebrow. The differences in their clothing were far outweighed by the similarities, so the overall effect was that they wore a uniform. Highly polished black shoes, charcoal-grey suiting (one had a faint pinstripe), starched white collars sitting above conservatively thin lapels. Each wore a small bronze badge on his breast pocket, a cursive “F”. Fordana then: bureaucrats in the mighty organisational machine that enabled most of the business ventures in the Thousand Worlds. Here to apply their planning and resource management prowess to the refugee effort.
            And where there were Fordana … Yes. Sitting on Markusz’s side of the vehicle and easy to miss, as the folklore went, because they held themselves so preternaturally still: Haibeu. Ascetic was the word that came to Markusz’s mind when he thought of Haibeu, and these two were no different. They looked sexless. Both perfectly hairless, their faces were a study in relaxed expressionlessness, gazing out at the passing scenery. Or perhaps they were oblivious to the outside, focused instead on some internal landscape.
            The mover dipped and landed on a pad near the top of one of the newer towers and two men and a woman embarked. All three wore sidearms and body armour, but they weren’t M-Def. That organisation would never have allowed soldiers with full face tattoos. These were Opitauans: mercenaries who traditionally supplied security for the “Great Paradisan Families”.
            They sat and Markusz noticed the younger of the two men glared at the Haibeu. The tattoos made him look fierce – which was obviously the intent – but this was more than that.
            “Fucking Hivers,” the man said and spat on the floor.
            The Haibeu gave no indication anyone had spoken.
            The older Opitauan reached past the woman and slapped his younger comrade on the side of the head. “Mind your manners or I’ll put you on report,” he said.
            The younger man didn’t acknowledge him, but concentrated just as fiercely on the floor.
            There were bound to be tensions with so many people from different worlds living on top of one another, Markusz thought. But he knew there was a special and widespread disaffection for Haibeu. They were quiet, polite and subservient. Or – if you preferred – uncommunicative, secretive and just plain weird. The fact, only discovered by accident, that their augments went far beyond the standard allowed by most of the Thousand Worlds deepened the distrust felt by many. The derogatory term Hivers was coined, indicating they functioned as brain-linked drones: worker bees serving some cybernetic governing module. It was uneducated bullshit. Originally the Haibeu were named the Fukei after the system they’d colonised. The Fukei government hadn’t offered an explanation for the extent of their citizenry’s implants. Neither did they confirm or deny the rumours and conspiracy theories that had sprung up around them. They did, however, change their trading name on the Consource from Fukei to Haibeu, which meant “hive” in their language. Perhaps they’d held on to a sense of humour despite all the changes they’d wrought on their physiology.
            The mover climbed and Markusz saw they were heading for a broad landing skirt surrounding a pavilion of glass and metal that sat even higher than the dock he’d left behind. His augment tagged the main entrance and labelled the structure: Redout Confederation Council Chamber.